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Smart cities as corporate storytellingOla Söderström, Till Paasche & Francisco KlauserPublished online: 11 Jun 2014.

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Smart cities as corporatestorytellingOla Soderstrom, Till Paasche and Francisco Klauser

On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belongingto IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibilityand legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical plan-ning theory, the paper analyzes IBM’s smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling,aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urbantechnologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM’s influential story about smartcities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systemsthinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questionsraised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moralimperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternativesmart city stories.

Key words: urban studies, technology, smart cities, actor-network theory, storytelling, geogra-phy, planning

Introduction

Smart cities, like creative cities, sustain-able cities or livable cities are part ofcontemporary language games around

urban management and development. Thesegames involve experts, marketing specialists,consultants, corporations, city officials, etc.and frame how cities are understood, concep-tualized and planned. Although we mightconsider this discursive activity with someskepticism, it often makes a difference. It isperformative, because it shapes the imagin-aries and practices of a myriad of actorsconcretely building the city through particu-lar case studies or pilot projects, decisions andeveryday action, like creating a new electri-city system for a neighborhood. We thereforetake discourse seriously in this paper andfocus on two important aspects of

contemporary ‘smart city talk’: we first lookat how the term smart city has been popular-ized in the discourse of municipalities, mediaand especially private firms and then, at morelength, how it has been given a specificcontent in IBM’s global and massive‘smarter cities’ campaign: the most developedattempt by a private company to define asmart model of urban management.1 Indoing this, we analyze key episodes in thestruggle over the definition of what smartcities are about, claiming that this struggle isan important element in the competitionbetween private companies over authorship,authority and profit in the smart citybusiness.

Drawing on critical planning theory, weconceptualize IBM’s smarter city campaignas a specific form of storytelling in theworld of planning (Mandelbaum 1991;

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Sandercock 2003; Throgmorton 1996, 2003;Van Hulst 2012) and show that it mobilizesand recycles two long-standing tropes: thecity conceived as a system of systems, and autopian discourse exposing urban pathologiesand their cure. On this basis, we developthree main arguments related to thepurpose, content and effects of the dominantsmart city story. The first is that this story isto a large extent propelled by attempts tocreate an ‘obligatory passage point’ (Callon1986; Latour 1987) in the transformation ofcities into ‘smart’ ones. In other words, it isconceived to channel urban developmentstrategies through the technological solutionsof IT companies. Second, we argue that thisdiscourse promotes a conception of urbanmanagement that is a technocratic fiction:one where data and software seem to sufficeand where, as a consequence, knowledge,interpretation and specific thematic expertiseappear as superfluous. Third, we claim thatthis discourse prioritizes public investmentsin IT over other domains of spending andthereby introduces a new ‘economy ofworth’ (Boltanski and Thevenot 2006)which is particularly problematic inresource-scarce cities.

The paper is embedded in a burgeoning lit-erature on smart cities and which can bedivided into two main categories: first, thereare studies focusing on the technologicalside which is concerned with specific ques-tions such as energy efficiency, carbon emis-sions, etc. (Bakıcı, Almirall, and Wareham2013; Fischedick 2012; Paskaleva 2011;Rat-Fischer et al. 2012; Streitz 2011). This lit-erature seeks to develop smart technologiesfor cities. There is then a second strand of lit-erature approaching smart cities as an objectof analysis and attempting to define thesmart city as an assemblage of technologiessuch as advanced information and communi-cations technology (ICT) infrastructure,smart cards in public transport, and e-govern-ance functions aimed at increasing competi-tiveness, administrative efficiency and(in some cases) social inclusion (Allwinkleand Cruickshank 2011; Caragliu, Del Bo,

and Nijkamp 2011; Deakin 2014; Deakinand Al Waer 2011; Kuk and Janssen 2011;Schaffers et al. 2011). However, little is actu-ally known about the more fundamentalprinciples and ideas underlying the smartcity as a model—that is, as a generic solutionto the problems of urban development andmanagement2—beyond the self-advertise-ment of IT companies and municipalities.Until recently, the existing literature wasalso lacking in critical engagement with theexception of an early text by Hollands(2008). However, since 2011, a series of con-tributions has more critically scrutinized thephenomenon from different viewpoints: pol-itical economy, science and technologystudies, governmentality studies and ideo-logical critique, moving research away fromthe self-celebratory climate around smartcities. This critique can be briefly summar-ized as follows. In Hollands’ (2008, 305) pio-neering paper, the smart city model isinterpreted as a contemporary high-techclothing of urban entrepreneurialism, which‘plays down some of the negative effects thedevelopment of new technologies are havingon cities’ such as growing social polarization.Looking at smart cities as the places wherethe concentration and interconnection of‘big data’ in cities lies, Kitchin (2014) raisesquestions of technocratic governance, cor-poratization of city governance or vulner-ability and surveillance, while Wyly (2013)combines technology studies and politicaleconomy to argue that smart cities are to beinterpreted in the context of the shift to ‘cog-nitive–cultural capitalism’ boosted by thetakeoff of automated data generation andmining, notably through social networks. Ina more Foucauldian perspective, Vanolo(2014) shifts the focus from data to citizensand discusses how the smart city model maybe a powerful disciplinary tool to shape‘smart citizens’, who are compelled to betechnologically literate. Finally, differentcontributions have targeted smart cities asan ideological construct and as a simplisticmodel of the urban. For Bell (2011, 73), it isa vision of cities ‘that frames all urban

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questions as essentially engineering problemsto be analyzed and solved using empirical,preferably quantitative, methods’ which give‘pre-eminence to urban phenomena that canbe measured and are deemed importantenough to measure’. In the same vein,Greenfield (2013, chap. 13) defines thedominant corporate discourse on smartcities as a return to the high modernism ofthe period 1880–1960: a Le Corbusier reduxbound to repeat the worst planning disastersof the 20th century in the 21st century.Based on a more detailed argument, Town-send (2013) sees in IBM’s smarter citydiscourse a resurrection of the urban cyber-netics of the 1970s. These recent contri-butions have begun to provide answers tothe agenda of critical questions identified byMcFarlane, Marvin, and Luque (2013, 25):the why?, who?, what?, how?, where? andemerging consequences of smart urbanism.

Our paper connects some ‘whys’ and‘hows’ of smart urbanism and pushesfurther the critical analysis of smart urbanismby focusing on the discourse of a centralactor: IBM. It thus particularly relates to thecritique of smart urbanism as an ideologicalconstruct focusing on the storytelling activityof the company as a means of securing andstrengthening its market position. Thus, theaim of this paper is to describe the emergenceof a prominent ‘spokesperson’ for the idea ofsmart cities in the public sphere and toanalyze the constitutive elements and imagin-aries in IBM’s discourse on smarter cities.Our argument unfolds in three differentsteps corresponding to three aspects of thisdiscourse. We first trace the origin and diffu-sion of the term ‘smart cities’ and examinehow cities became problematized as smartand by whom. Then, we focus on IBM’ssmarter cities campaign to show how, onthe one hand, the company translates differ-ent dimensions of the urban world into aunitary language and how, on the otherhand, cities thus translated are inscribed in anarrative of positive transformation. Thepaper is based on three different methodsand types of empirical material: the first is a

media survey, using LexisNexis, to trackdown the moments and places of origin ofthe term smart cities; the second is a criticaldiscourse analysis of the abundant onlineinformation of IBM’s smarter city campaign;the third is a series of interviews in 2012 and2013 with IBM and other specialists involvedin projects using smart technologies inSwitzerland.

Translating and narrating the smart city

In quite general terms, smart cities involvethe creation of new relations between tech-nology and society. According to thisvision, as we show below, urban infrastruc-tures and everyday life in cities are optimizedthrough technologies provided by IT compa-nies. These companies are the main producersof a discourse about (the benefits of) smartcities that they produce both to describetheir activity in the domain and to stagethemselves as central actors of this urbanmanagement model. This process is resonantwith actor-network theory’s (ANT) focuson the making of socio-technical networksand how certain actors try to create fortheir interests what Callon (1986, 183) callsin his seminal paper ‘obligatory passagepoints’ (OPPs hereafter). For Callon (1986,180–185), the first and crucial step in the cre-ation of socio-technical networks is the pro-blematization of a situation in order tobecome indispensable actors in a network. Itsupposes of course the definition of theproblem that needs to be solved, but alsothat of the actors involved and the creationof OPPs, through which these actors will bein a position to solve the problem. Concre-tely, an OPP is a place (a geographical oneor an institution), or a procedure thatbecomes unavoidable: a vaccine developedby a pharmaceutical firm to avoid a disease,for instance. Here, the discourse aboutsmart cities can be interpreted as a tool tomake certain actors and technologies OPPsor key actors in the development andimplementation of specific forms of urban

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management solutions. As we will show,IBM crafts a story that presents their smarttechnologies as the only solution for variousurban problems and hence becomes anOPP. The use of mediations—from smalltalk to complex machines—to translatephenomena into a manageable language—isa powerful means of creating OPPs (Latour1987). We will show here how the translationof the different dimensions of the urbanworld into the unitary language of urbansystems is crucial in IBM’s campaign.Finally, this discourse really gains momen-tum once cities and their problems thustranslated are embedded in a narrative ofpositive transformation. Here, the smart citydiscourse becomes a story with a plot andcan be fruitfully interpreted in the light ofresearch on storytelling in planning.

Since the 1990s, there has been wide recog-nition within planning theory of the role ofstorytelling (Van Hulst 2012). Stories areimportant because they provide actorsinvolved in planning with an understandingof what the problem they have to solve is(Van Hulst 2012, 314). More specifically,they play a central role in planning becausethey ‘can be powerful agents or aids in theservice of change, as shapers of a new imagin-ation of alternatives’ (Sandercock 2003, 18).For Throgmorton (1996, 2003), stories arethe very stuff of planning, which, fundamen-tally, is persuasive and constitutive storytell-ing about the future. Seen in thisperspective, planning is about ‘emplotment,characterizations, descriptions of settings,and rhythm and imagery of language’(Throgmorton 2003, 126). It is also aboutpower, as storytelling in planning calls for acritical analysis that asks ‘who has thepower to give meaning to things, to nameothers, to construct the character of collectiveidentities, to shape the discussion of urbanpolitics [ . . . ]?’ (Throgmorton 2003, 132).

This is what this paper does: it looks at whohas the power to define the smartness of citiesand what the discussions around this themeshould be concerned with. An importantdifference, as far as previous analyses of

storytelling in planning are concerned, isthat in our case the author of the story isnot an individual planner or a planningoffice, but a private company, whichaddresses (mainly) municipalities to persuadethem of the central role that IBM can play in anew era of (smart) planning. Our paper istherefore not based on interviews withplanners, but studies the story that a largeprivate company tells about smart cities in aworldwide marketing campaign. It considersthe ingredients of this storytelling to be oper-ators of power in an emergent field ofthought and action. This will lead us to askin our conclusion how other stories aboutsmart cities might be told.

Emergence of the smart city discourse

Hollands (2008) and Vanolo (2014) haveshown that the idea of the smart city isrelated to a double lineage in planning litera-ture: the concept of Smart Growth as theo-rized by the New Urbanism movement inthe USA of the 1980s and, on the otherhand, the concept of the technology-basedintelligent city. However, if we want tograsp the wider efficacy of the term we haveto look at a broader public sphere by study-ing the media. Therefore, we focus here onthe term smart city to show how it emergedin the media sphere. Our findings are basedon LexisNexis, a large commercial newspaperdatabase, and we have focused our researchon international newspapers in English.3

This analysis shows that the term ‘smartcity’ first appeared in the mid-1990s. It wasmainly used in the ‘self-congratulatoryways’ Hollands (2008, 307) has criticized.The content of the newspaper articles usingthe term shows that in that period citieslabeled themselves as ‘smart’ when theyintroduced functioning ICT infrastructure,e-governance or attracted high-tech indus-tries to foster economic growth. However,there are two examples where the termsmart city is used to describe a morecomplex discursive and technological

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phenomenon. In 1994, the MultifunctionPolis (MFP), an autonomous smart city, wasplanned near Adelaide, Australia. In 1997,the two cities of Cyberjaya and Putrajaya,Malaysia, were re-planned as intelligentgarden cities labeled as ‘smart cities’. Whatmade the Australian and Malaysian casesmart was their vision to use ICT infrastruc-ture not simply to attract business, but, as faras this was possible at the time, to let the ICTgrid steer the functioning of the city in orderto automatize and optimize its processes.While some of the key words used in thenewspaper coverage where still ‘high speedICT’, ‘e-government’ and ‘attracting invest-ment’, they were extended by the referenceto other terms: ‘sustainability’, ‘eco andsmart homes’, ‘environmental innovations’or ‘public transport using GPS’. Premisedon the idea of an optimization and auto-mation of urban infrastructures, which hasbecome central in the discourse and technol-ogy of smart cities, these two cases of the late1990s can in retrospective be seen as pioneer-ing ones for the more recent developments ofthe concept. Therefore, the term smart cityfirst emerges in the media as a self-definitionof a series of municipalities like Adelaide orCyberjaya.4

Then, we have a second moment after 2008characterized by the intervention of privatecompanies in the IT sector, among whichIBM. On 6 November 2008, in the midst ofthe financial crisis, Sam Palmisano (IBM’sCEO at that time) gave a talk entitled ‘ASmarter Planet: The Next LeadershipAgenda’ which had a large impact in themedia.5 In this speech, Palmisano arguesthat the world and its cities must becomesmarter to become more sustainable andeconomically efficient. Timely to thisspeech, IBM launched an extensive smarterplanet advertisement—discussed below—which is running until the present day.

A few months later, on 25 September 2009,to position itself more firmly in the emergingsmart city talk, the company officially filesthe term ‘smarter cities’ to be registered as atrademark: ‘Mark: 79077782; Word Mark:

SMARTER CITIES; Serial Number:79077782; Registration Number: 4033245’.6

The trademark was registered two yearslater on 4 October 2011. With Palmisano’sspeech and the trademark, we have a proble-matization of cities as smart cities, the firststep in the creation of an OPP. Cities’ pro-blems are defined as the need to becomesmarter and the central actors of theprocess—IBM, municipalities—are ident-ified. If IBM is far from being the unique con-tender in the business,7 it has since 2008acquired a very visible position. We nowmove on to show how the company’s dis-course unfolds in its very extensive smartercity campaign initiated in 2008 focusing onthe campaign’s website.8

Crafting the smarter city story

The 1990s and early 2000s were difficulttimes for IBM. Its annual losses reached 8billion USD in 1993. This led to drastic stra-tegic changes and the announcement in 2002of the company’s move away from hardwaredesign and production to concentrate on con-sultancy and software. In 2004, the companysold its PC division to the Chinese companyLenovo. The aim of these changes was ‘to“move up the value chain” into “more lucra-tive fields”’ (McNeill 2013, 2). At the time,IBM had realized the importance for aglobal company like itself of the market pre-sented by urban technologies. The 2008launch of IBM’s smarter planet campaign isto be interpreted within this context. Studiesdone by senior cadres of the company in theearly 2000s had identified cities as a hugeuntapped market (Townsend 2013, 64).According to estimates, this market will rep-resent: 39.5 billion9 USD by 2016 or 20.2billion10 USD by 2020. In order to try andobtain the largest possible share in thismarket, IBM has developed a strategy invol-ving two elements: first, a ‘full-scale contract-ing for city governments’ (McNeill 2013, 7)with flagship contracts such as those withSingapore and Rio; and second, its Smarter

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Cities Challenge where experts provide 100municipalities over the world with pro bonoconsultancy in the hope that this initialinvestment will yield returns. It also allowsthe company to claim that its expertise isbased on its involvement with 2000 citiesworldwide. On the whole, as Hollands(2013, 9) notes, ‘this strategy has clearlypaid off, generating some 3 billion USD’ ofincome and representing ‘currently 25% ofIBM’s operations’. It makes IBM the marketleader in the business of smart urban technol-ogies in terms of sales and strategy.11

The smarter cities campaign, to which wenow turn, has been designed to provide thecompany’s strategy and services with aglobal visibility. It makes abundant use ofvideo testimonies, pedagogical diagrams andcase studies from around the world as itstargets are not technological experts but anaudience on the management level (municipa-lities, security, communication or transportcompanies) which, if convinced by the argu-ment, is able to decide on the implementationof ‘smart’ urban technologies. Within thisambitious campaign, costing the company100 million USD (Townsend 2013, 31), twoaspects can be analytically distinguished: thetranslation of the city into a unitary languageand its inscription into a transformative nar-rative. Making our way through these twoaspects of the company’s discursive strategywe will encounter two well-known topoi inurban planning history working as the mainrhetorical devices of the campaign: thesystems metaphor and utopianism.

IBM’s urban theory rests on two mainassumptions. First, the city is based on threemain pillars:12 planning and management ser-vices; infrastructure services; and human ser-vices. Each of these pillars is sub-divided intothree sub-pillars: ‘Planning and managementservices’ into public safety, smarter buildingsand urban planning, government and agencyadministration; ‘Infrastructure services’ intoenergy and water, environment and transpor-tation; ‘Human services’ into social pro-grams, health care and education. The sumof these nine pillars makes ‘the city’.13

Ideally, all nine systems would be monitoredand regulated in IBM’s ‘Intelligent Oper-ations Center’, the ‘central nerve system’ ofthe city, first experienced in the city of Riode Janeiro.14 The city is thus seen from thepoint of view of a municipality: these pillarsredefine the main administrative divisions ofmost cities around the world.

Second assumption, each of these pillars isan individual system and the city is a‘system of systems’. Systems thinking is notonly used as a practical way to schematize acomplex phenomenon—the city—but as atool used in IBM’s service provision to muni-cipalities. Justin Cook, manager of IBM’sFoundational Research Team, thus explains,referring to collaboration with the city ofPortland, that ‘we want to help these peoplebecome systems thinkers [ . . . ] to help themsee relations’.15 He goes on to a moregeneral declaration: ‘As systems thinkers weneed to be thinking about the interconnec-tions between these things and the ways tobring this all together so that the wholeplanet works in a better way.’ Faith insystems thinking is also expressed at thevery top of the company’s hierarchy: GinniRometty, IBM’s CEO since 2012, explainingsmarter cities at a conference in Rio, thus pre-sents data and systems analysis as the verycore of how to make cities smarter.16 Usingan enlightenment rhetoric where data andsystems theory are the means throughwhich municipalities can move ‘from gut-feeling and impressions to knowledge’, thenew CEO (probably unconsciously) situatesherself in the lineage of the social reformistsof the previous turn of the century: aCharles Booth, for instance, describing hissurvey and mapping of London poverty asbringing the light of science on the city(Soderstrom 1996).

Systems thinking is of course not a newperspective in urban theory and planning.There is a long genealogy of works withinurban theory and planning defining the cityas a system. Systems thinking about citiesfinds its roots in organicism and more pre-cisely in visions of the city informed by

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William Harvey’s theory of blood circulationin the early 17th century. Harvey’s researchon the functions of the heart, arteries andveins, was critical in secularizing the under-standing of the body as a machinic systemof circulations (Sennett 1994). This vision ofthe body, Sennett (1994, 263–264) argues,progressively informed urban planning ofthe Baroque period and the Enlightenment:

‘Enlightened planners wanted the city in itsvery design to function like a healthy body[. . . ] Thus were the words “arteries” and“veins” applied to city streets in theeighteenth century by designers who soughtto model traffic systems on the blood systemof the body.’

Thereby, organicism envisaging bodies like aset of (nervous, sanguine, etc.) systems of cir-culation provided urban design with analternative to former rational geometricmodels of spatial organization (Friedmann,quoted by Mehmood 2010, 69).

The common denominator of organicistapproaches in planning is a holistic viewwhere cities are approached as composed offunctionally related parts. Systems thinkingin urban theory is a continuation of the orga-nicist tradition in that respect but building ona different metaphor. If the body (and thenmore broadly living organisms) is the modelof traditional organicism, systems theorybuilds on the computer metaphor. Theurban totality is a large calculating systemrather than a biological entity.

Systems theory has been one of the mostinfluential and enduring approaches inurban thought since the 1960s, both in plan-ning theory (Healey and Hillier 2010) andin urban geography (Mandelbaum 1985).Forty-four years before IBM launched itscampaign, Brian Berry (1964) famouslydefined ‘cities as systems within systems ofcities’ using the same Russian doll idea thatis to be found in IBM’s urban systemsscheme. A few years later, Churchman(1968, quoted by Mehmood 2010) identifiedfour different approaches in systems think-ing: the efficiency, scientific, humanistic and

anti-planning approach. IBM’s systemsrhetoric clearly prioritizes an efficiencyapproach ‘which concentrates on reducingwaste (of time, resources, materials, etc.)’(Mehmood 2010, 77).17 More precisely,IBM’s approach is indebted to Jay Forrester(1969), a computer engineer, and his workon urban dynamics in the late 1960s.Although applied with no success in Pitts-burgh in the early 1960s and New York inthe early 1970s, urban dynamics have beenresurrected by Justin Cook, the IBM smartcity strategist who is also a former graduateof MIT’s Sloan School of Managementwhere Forrester had been a professor (Town-send 2013, 83). There is something apparentlyodd in this resurrection as it gives the audi-ence of the smarter cities campaign a senseof traveling back to the heroic times ofpost-war cybernetics. If we consider urbandynamics as a translation device used for thepurpose of storytelling, this choice becomesless enigmatic. What urban systems theoryprovides, seen from this perspective, is pri-marily a powerful metaphor creating asurface of equivalence. It translates verydifferent urban phenomena into data thatcan be related together according to a classicalsystemic approach which identifies elements,interconnections, purposes, feedback loops,delays, etc. Thus, the website is packed withschemes and flash animations showing howcontemporary cities are constituted by func-tioning and measurable (but highly perfecti-ble) urban systems and infrastructures. Asmillimeter paper is used as a surface of equiv-alence to translate and mathematize differentliving organisms observed through a micro-scope in biology (Lynch 1988), so urbandynamics translate the city into a singlelanguage. We have here, after problematiza-tion, a second important step in the consti-tution of an OPP: translation. The city ismade to speak the language of IBM.

Two observations can be made on howurban systems are described in the campaign.First, it takes for granted that there are infra-structures: it never considers cities where thelack, breakdown, worsening, centrally

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unmanaged urban systems and infrastruc-tures is the norm, as it is in most cities ofthe Global South (Beall and Fox2009; Gandy 2004). Bakker (2011, 63), forinstance,

‘suggests that the term “network”, and theinterconnectedness it evokes is a poordescriptor of water supply systems in manycities. Rather, the metaphor of thearchipelago—spatially separated but linked“islands” of networked supply in the urbanfabric—is more accurate than the term“network”.’

In other words, this form of systems thinkingpresuming the existence of a set of urbansystems is very largely North-centric. Thesecond observation derives from systemstheory as a surface of equivalence. In thisapproach, cities are no longer made of differ-ent—and to a large extent incommensur-able—socio-technical worlds (education,business, safety and the like) but as datawithin systemic processes. This is of courseone of the great advantages of data-based sys-temic analysis. However, the way the cam-paign presents the nine pillars and theirrelation tends to reduce the analysis of thecity to a machinic vision of cities. As aresult, the analysis of these ‘urban themes’no longer seem to require thematic expertsfamiliar with the specifics of a ‘field’ butonly data mining, data interconnectednessand software-based analysis. This is particu-larly clear in IBM’s three Is equation wherethe smarter city is the result of Instrumenta-tion (the transformation of urban phenomenainto data) + Interconnection of data + theIntelligence brought by software. Complex-ity, multipli-city is simplified, flattened intothe uni-city of scaled systems and presentsitself as IBM’s fiat lux to its clients. Thisreduction of expertise has political conse-quences: as Marcuse (2005, 252) observes,the organic or systems metaphor alsocreates a fictitious entity ‘the city’ supporting‘a search for consensus politics, in which theclaims of the minority or powerless or disen-franchized or non-mainstream groups are

considered disturbing factors in the questfor policies benefiting “the whole”’.

This technocratic approach to cities is pre-sented as the key to efficient urban manage-ment through a recurrent trope in thesmarter city campaign: the ‘if . . . then . . . ’:

‘If we think about it as a whole, if we integratethe system, we can keep the city’s resourcesfrom getting trapped between locations.’18

Ontological transformation is in other wordsthe source of the model’s epistemologicalpower. Moreover, in this version of systemsthinking this transformation spares us the dif-ficulties of interpretation: translated into dataand systems, the city seems to speak by itself,to be self-explanatory. Therefore, at its core,this is what structures IBM’s smarter city dis-course: an engineering epistemology appliedto humans and non-humans. Nature andculture reunited by the engineering mind.Systems thinking of course also transformsthe nine pillars (or themes) in terms that canbe addressed by the company’s technologiesand services. The nine pillars become com-binable in one large system where all infor-mation is being brought together to beprocessed and then optimized to turn ‘thecity’ into a ‘smarter city’. This does notmean that in practice the company does notneed or seek collaborations, but in its dis-course it nurtures an imaginary of an urbanmanagement reduced to systems engineering.

Once defined in this way, the city can beembedded in a larger narrative about thecity’s past, present and future. This narrative,as we will see now in more detail, is a utopianone, in the strict sense of the genre, with itsdiagnosis of urban ills and its healing therapy.

Transforming the city

In its campaign, IBM constantly emphasizesthe problems and shortcomings of the con-temporary city. In general terms, thecompany argues that with ‘rising urbanpopulations, ageing infrastructures, and

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shrinking tax revenues today’s cities demandmore than traditional solutions’.19

Across domains, cities, in IBM’s urbantheory, are facing the same issues: ‘growingdemands’, ‘tightening budgets’, ‘financialdeficits’, ‘volatile markets’, ‘growing com-plexities’, ‘pollution’, ‘urban growth’. Thecity is in other words a ‘sick city’ permeatedby a series of pathologies. To confrontthem, municipalities are hampered by‘inadequate systems to serve basic needs’,‘obsolete’ or ‘broken technologies’, ‘litigationcosts’, ‘benefit frauds’ and ‘wasted time’.20 Inshort, the picture is grim and cities appearclose to a fatal breakdown.

What this narrative conveys is the negativeside of the ‘utopian mirror image’ (Choay1997, 261–262). As planning historian Fran-coise Choay (1997) has argued, this is sinceThomas More’s Utopia (1516) a constitutivetrope of the utopian tradition in urban plan-ning.21 Utopian urban planning is alwaysconceived, she argues, as a therapeutic dis-course starting off with a diagnosis of urbanproblems and pursuing with a set of univer-sally valid solutions. She defines the utopiangenre as: a single voice proposing—througha narrative distinguishing between a cor-rupted past and a perfect and immutablefuture—an ideal and universally valid modelof society constituted by rational spatialform. IBM’s smarter city discourse is inmany respects in line with this tradition: itscore is utopian storytelling.

First, the smarter cities story is a univocalone: nowhere in the campaign are otherapproaches or solutions to urban problemsmentioned (Vodoz 2013, 52). Utopianism,like the smarter cities model of urban man-agement, is not a collective project assem-bling different worldviews and interests, buta singular ‘emancipatory’ vision. Thus, thereply to Throgmorton’s (1996) question‘who tells the story?’ is simple: the corpor-ation. Second, the smarter cities campaignhinges on a before–after demonstrationclosely related to the above mentioned ‘if . . .(data-mining and systems thinking) then . . .

(cities will become smarter)’ argument. This

is most vividly conveyed on their websiteby one of the first elements visitors encoun-ter: an invitation to visit the museum ofurban problems: ‘Before the City got Smart,Exhibition’. The ‘exhibition’ proposes atravel in time where problems are portrayedas pictures hung on the line and where visi-tors learn about problems of the past,now—in the fictitious present of an accom-plished smart city—resolved by smart tech-nologies. ‘With intelligence infused into theway cities worked, urban blights becamehistory’, the introduction to the exhibitionproudly announces.22 This before–after—or‘weightwatchers’—rhetoric is repeatedthroughout the exhibition as well as in thepresentation of IBM’s smart services andtechnologies. Throughout, technological sol-utions are presented as the pharmakon ofcontemporary urban pathologies throughimages and short stories.

One canvas for instance is entitled ‘thequeue’ and explains that:

‘Before the advent of smart informationsystems, people actually had to turn up inperson to be seen by health centers, passportoffices, post offices, embassies, the DVLAand the DMV. Long lines, known as“queues”, quickly formed as people stoodaround aimlessly for hours. Finally in theearly 21st century, electronic declarations cutqueues and billions of euros in administrationcosts.’23

The third aspect of a utopian rhetoric, thesmarter cities story, depicts a model of a per-fectly functioning urban society but, in con-trast with classical utopianism, it isgoverned by code rather than spatial form.Problems are specified as we have seenthrough ‘a culture of analytics and systems’and thereby brought to a level where theycan be addressed through code. This requiresaccess to data and their interconnectionthrough software. Data, it is argued, aretrapped, ‘unsmartly’ organized in infor-mation silos, lost and not available whenneeded.24 They are under-used and theirpotential should therefore be unleashed.

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When detailed information on all aspects ofthe nine systems is systematically collectedand connected, IBM’s algorithms canprocess the data and optimize each system.In case usable data do not exist, it has to beproduced. Digital electricity meters with aconnection to the Internet should, forinstance, replace analogous ones to allowthe implementation of smart electricity gridsenabling a more efficient use of electricity.The solution is summarized in the marketinglanguage of IBM as the three Is: to becomesmarter, the world (or the city) needs to beInstrumented, Interconnected and Intelli-gent. In other words, the core of ‘smartness’lies in the algorithm.

Optimization through code is therefore theutopia promised by the company. As the vicepresident of the smarter infrastructure div-ision puts it: ‘The ultimate smart city, theShangri La if you will, is one where all thesystems communicate.’25 This ‘ultimatesmart city’ is a transparent one where allflows within the nine systems are quantified,connected and efficiently managed. Takepublic safety and traffic, for instance. Herethe smarter cities program is not designed tosuggest more police officers, police cars orroads, but information about them: whereofficers are, where accidents or traffic jamsoccur. Therefore, ‘smarter cities’ is a mildutopianism: it promises efficiency ratherthan paradise on earth. It is a utopian rhetorictempered by market realism: it is easier to selltechnologies and services than an ad nihilourban structure, more convincing to tap onthe faith in technology and progress than topromise a brave new city. As Vodoz (2013,71) notes, the ideal of perfection is transposedfrom material space to virtual space. In otherwords, the smarter cities model does notsuggest a revolution in urban morphology,such as Howard’s garden city model, but areformist optimization through data, moni-toring, interconnectedness and automaticsteering mechanisms. In contrast with otherutopian models, smarter cities do notrequire the replacement of existing spaces,but its digital redoubling.

Finally, in the perfect future of classicalutopias, historicity is abolished: the arrowof time is bent into a circular repetition. Inthe bright future promised by IBM’ssmarter cities, historicity is not abolishedbecause optimization needs to be constantlyrenewed: novel technologies need to be con-stantly introduced for that purpose andcodes constantly rewritten. If IBM’s story-telling rests on a utopian rhetoric it con-stantly makes sure that the future itpromotes is a realistic one.

In sum then, IBM’s storytelling rests on tworhetoric pillars. The first is systems thinkingwhich inscribes it in a techno-scientific imagination and provides it with thelegitimacy of science. More concretely, itallows the translation of the city into acommon language on which the company’stechnology can act. The second is a utopianstory which recurs to an imaginary ofprogress, therapy and conversion (if notredemption). Each rhetoric pillar brings differ-ent elements to the persuasive power of thesmarter cities campaign. They are buildingblocks of this discourse’s authority. This discur-sive strategy is meant to persuade municipalitiesto think of the company as an OPP for an effi-cient and sustainable urban development.

Conclusion: the smarter city discourse as aframing device

On the surface, the dominant smart cities’storyline is about efficient and sustainablecities, but underneath it is primarily a strategictool for gaining a dominant position in a hugemarket where, as Townsend (2013, 63) puts it,‘Siemens and Cisco aim to be the electricianand the plumber [ . . . ] [and IBM] their chor-eographer, superintendent, and oracle rolledinto one’. Our paper looked at IBM’s story-telling in its smarter city campaign in orderto grasp some central specificities of thesmart city model of urban development as itis usually presented in the public sphere.This story should not be taken at face valueof course. What we have proposed is not a

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description of how smart cities work on theground but a deconstruction of a communi-cation strategy: what one of our IBM infor-mants calls a market creation strategy.26 Thesmarter city discourse is a framing device, asare other discourses on urban development:it makes us consider cities differently topromote new modes of urban managementand development. It more specifically devel-ops what Vanolo (2014, 893) calls a ‘smart-mentality’ through which ‘citizens are verysubtly asked to participate in the constructionof smart cities’. This mentality has of coursepositive aspects: it favors, for instance, effi-cient solutions to improve urban sustainabilityin sectors such as energy or transport.However, it also raises a series of critical ques-tions. We briefly address two of them below.

The first is that this discourse promotes aninformational and technocratic conception ofurban management where data and softwareseem to suffice and where, as a consequence,knowledge, interpretation and specific the-matic expertise appear as superfluous. Thisis a rather dangerous fiction. It leads usback to an epistemology dominant duringthe 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of spatialanalysis and of the belief in the universalpower of quantitative models in a disciplinelike human geography (Billinge, Gregory,and Martin 1984). We must admit that theplurality of approaches and languagesdeveloped in urban studies since the 1970sdoes not facilitate their fruitful use in urbanmanagement and development strategies.Nonetheless, a return to positivist dream-lands would hardly be progress as problemscannot be reduced to data problems butneed to be interpreted in the light of long-standing political and scientific debates. Fur-thermore, we’ve been there before: municipa-lities in the 1960s and 1970s have alreadyexperienced the deleterious consequences oftaking such stories about large-scale simu-lations being the ultimate planning solutionat face value (Townsend 2013, 76–82).

The second and correlated point is that sucha discourse promotes a mentality where urbanaffairs are framed as an apolitical matter. In the

smarter cities campaign, causes of urban pro-blems are associated with demographictrends, such as an estimated doubling ofworld urban population by 2050,27 climatechange and tight municipal budgets. Neverwith politics. The rhetorical means of the cam-paign also aspire to political neutrality.Systems thinking is neither progressive, norconservative: it decomposes a phenomenoninto related parts. There are of course leftand right-wing utopias, but the horizon of autopian structure of thinking is apolitical. AsChoay (1997, 174) points out, politicalpower in utopias is an ‘epiphenomenon’. Simi-larly, smart technologies can optimize anysystem, from the surveillance of politicalopponents to waste management. It can besold to democratic regimes such as Denmarkas well as to much less democratic ones suchas Syria. Very much like Le Corbusier sawfunctionalist urbanism as an apolitical modelhe was ready to propose to postcolonialIndia, fascist Rome or Stalinist Russia, smarturban technologies are an omnibus ready tostop wherever customers are to be found.

The apparent political neutrality of thedominant smart city story is reinforced bythe production of evaluation criteria and rank-ings where cities are classified according totheir degree of smartness28 and by suprana-tional funding programs such as the 2012European Union (EU) program on ‘SmartCities and Communities’.29 These initiativesintroduce a new ‘economy of worth’ (Bol-tanski and Thevenot 2006)—a new way ofevaluating the worth of people and things—urging cities at the bottom to climb up thesmart city ladder. Such rankings and financialincentives fueled by smart talk can of courselead to necessary technological developments,but they might also obfuscate more urgentneeds. Becoming a smarter city impliesgiving priority to investments in technologywhile technology-poor affordable housing orsewage systems are arguably more urgent inmany of the world’s cities. Priority-makingis of course not an apolitical matter, butthe very core of municipal politics. Inother words, IBM’s storytelling campaign

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contributes to subtly introducing a new moralimperative where smartness becomes, likecreativity, a new necessary asset of cities.The apparent apoliticism of the campaign nat-uralizes ubiquitous urban technology as anOPP for municipalities’ development.

Recent critical work on smart cities hasexplored alternatives to this dominant corpor-ate vision of urban futures (Townsend 2013;Hollands 2013; McFarlane et al. 2013). ForHollands (2013, 13), ‘the real smart city hasto begin to think with its collective socialand political brain, rather than through its“technological tools”’. This alternative smartcity exists. It is made up of myriads of initiat-ives where technology is used to empowercommunity networks, to monitor equalaccess to urban infrastructures or scale upnew forms of sustainable living. However,contrary to corporate storytelling, no straight-forward narrative about the smart cityemerges from these initiatives as they can bedriven by very different and politically varie-gated motives. It is in this context that analternative storytelling about smart cities isnecessary. Storytelling in planning is notonly a possible model of planning but alsofor planning (Van Hulst 2012) and shouldnot only be used as an instrument of critiquebut also as an instrument to suggest progress-ive avenues for urban development (Sander-cock 2003, 26). This is not an easy taskbecause it requires generalization from initiat-ives that respond to local needs and are there-fore usually local in scope. It also requiresbeing explicit about normative and politicalpositioning as smartness only makes sensewithin a system of values and aims.However, this effort in storytelling is necess-ary to move beyond critique, and beyond amere contrast between corporate grandschemes and what easily might be perceivedas anecdotal small-scale actions.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the research ‘SmarterCities: New Urban Policy Model in the

Making’, funded by the EU-COST Action‘Living in Surveillance Societies’ (LiSS).

Notes

1 In this paper, we alternatively use the terms ‘smartcities’ and ‘smarter cities’. Both refer to the sameidea and are often used interchangeably in theliterature and online publications. The differencebetween the two is that ‘smart city’ is legallyunprotected and can thus be used more freely or isinterpreted and applied more widely while‘smarter cities’, as we explain below, legallybelongs to IBM and refers to the company’ssoftware and campaigns. We therefore use theterm smart city to discuss existing literature andwhen tracing the origins of the smart city idea, whilewe use smarter cities when discussing IBM’scampaign.

2 A ‘model’, etymologically, is a figure to bereproduced (Soderstrom and Paquot 2012, 41).See also developments below on urban models andthe utopian planning genre.

3 As exact search parameters we used ‘smart! city’allowing a search for all word combinations startingwith smart and city (in newspapers only). There were1952 matches, date of search: 5 September 2012.

4 The Adelaide project failed in 1997 due to a lack ofinvestments leading to the fact that it eventuallybecame an ordinary business park. For analyses ofthe Malaysian case, see: Bunnell (2002), Lepawsky(2005) and Brooker (2013).

5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_j4-Fm_Svs6 http://www.trademarks411.com/marks/

79077782-smarter-cities7 In 2001, Cisco started, together with the developer

Gale International, to build the smart city of Songdoin South Korea and in 2010 founded the ‘Smart andConnected Communities Institute’ and the‘Connected Urban Development Initiative’ wherethe company’s research on urban technologies isbeing conducted. In 2011, Siemens decided toinvest on a huge scale in a new Infrastructure andCities division and its own version of smarturbanism. Microsoft entered the game in 2013 withits City Next initiative.

8 The site analyzed is the US site of the smarter citiescampaign which is richest in information (www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html and www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/index_flash.html).Country-specific websites are slimmed down andtranslated versions of the US sites.

9 According to the market research company ABI(https://www.abiresearch.com/press/395-billion-will-be-spent-on-smart-city-technologi).

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10 According to the market research company Navigant(www.navigantresearch.com/research/navigant-research-leaderboard-report-smart-city-suppliers).

11 See, for instance, http://www.navigantresearch.com/research/navigant-research-leaderboard-report-smart-city-suppliers

12 In IBM’s words: ‘What makes a city? The answer, ofcourse, is all three [pillars]’ (http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html).

13 On its interactive site, IBM does not use the hierarchyof main and sub-pillars but uses a list of 11 individualpillars, but there are only minor differences in content(cf. http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/index_flash.html).

14 The project started in 2010 (http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/intelligent-operations-center/). Siemens’s City Cockpit, firstshowcased in Singapore in 2009, is anothervariation of the same idea.

15 Speech given at USC Price, School of Policy Planningand Development in November 2011 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpFyQOW_ldQ).

16 http://www.forum48.org/portfolio/ginni-rometty/17 Interestingly however, Cook (the company’s above-

mentioned systems thinker in chief) refers to DonellaH. Meadows, lead author of The Limits to Growth,and author of a humanistic/environmentalist pleafor systems thinking building on more elaboratecomplex systems theory (Meadows et al. 1972).

18 http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/us__en_us__cities__city_leaders_wsj.pdf

19 http://ibmtvdemo.edgesuite.net/software/industry/intelligent-oper-center/demo/3137_ControlRoom_Web.html

20 See, for instance: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html; http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/healthcare_solutions/ideas/index.html;http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/government/ideas/index.html

21 For Choay (1997) there are two main traditions, theutopian one, that she calls the model, and ‘the rule’for which urban planning is based on a set ofgenerative principles and which finds its origin inLeon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1485).

22 http://www-07.ibm.com/innovation/my/exhibit/index.html

23 http://www-07.ibm.com/innovation/my/exhibit/gallery_low.html#queue

24 See, for instance: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/communications/chapter3.html#!/0; http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/traffic/index.html#!/1; http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/airports/index.html#!/3

25 http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/green_buildings/overview/index.html

26 IBM manager, interview 13 February 2013.27 See www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/

us__en_us__cities__city_leaders_wsj.pdf28 For instance: http://www.smart-cities.eu/

benchmarking.html29 On the EU program, see: http://ec.europa.eu/

eip/smartcities/

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